


Something You Should Know First

by YesBothWays



Series: Supergirl's sexuality [2]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-26
Updated: 2016-11-26
Packaged: 2018-09-02 06:15:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8653903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YesBothWays/pseuds/YesBothWays
Summary: Kara tells Lena that she's Supergirl.  Everyone is fragile.  Everyone is brave.





	

            Lena and I were on a walk in the park. She had taken me to a Japanese fusion restaurant. She was always impressed that I could handle as many courses as her restaurants could throw at me. She had commented not long before that I was her favorite person to eat with because I never talked about how I shouldn’t eat something or spoiled my dinner with anxieties about remaining thin. I laughed and said that among all women, I was privileged on that front – sports culture, I guess, and I was more worried about staying strong. After an enormous slice of red bean cheesecake that ended that night, I had to finally concede that I was entirely full.

            “So it is possible,” Lena said as if in astonishment.

            She stood up, laughing, and got her coat on.

            “Come on. I’ll take you for a walk to work up your appetite. Should only take a few blocks to get you settled back to normal.”

            We were near Central Park. Lena asked if I was afraid to walk there. I stifled a laugh then said not if we kept to the edge and where there were plenty of lights. I think it sounded convincing. She walked us on paths beside the water and over every bridge we came across. The night air was cool and still. The city felt clean and peaceful, both of which were rare feelings in the city. I tried not to listen for any sounds of distress. I had my phone in my pocket, and I was always on call. So we just wandered around and talked over this and that, not really going anywhere with either. We stopped in the middle of each bridge to look down at the reflections in the night water.

            “You should come to my place sometime,” Lena said to me.

            “Oh, yeah!” I said excited by the idea, which somehow had never occurred to me, and wondered what her place looked like.

            “I’ll take you over after dinner. I can’t promise I won’t try to keep you up terribly late,” Lena said.

            She had turned on the bridge and leaned her back into the railing when she said this. And she had raised her eyebrows and grinned at me in a way meant to ensure that I knew for sure that was a flirtation if I wanted it to be one. I got coy, mostly because I initially grinned in a way that must have made my excitement obvious, but I also thought about how she didn’t know who I really was.

            “You’re a bit straight-edge for that kind of deviant behavior, I’d imagine,” she said, raising her chin, teasing me softly.

            “I think that you might be surprised,” I said.

            “God, I do hope so,” Lena said.

            I was giddy about our conversation all that night. After we parted ways, I went out flying just for the joy of it, which I had not done in a long time. In the morning, I finally felt the reality of the situation settle onto me, and I wasn’t just happy anymore. I was going to have to tell Lena I was Supergirl. I couldn’t keep up my act anymore. It wasn’t just that she had invited me to her place, or how often I caught myself thinking about what it would be like if we kissed. It was how much we enjoyed each other, how safe we both felt together. It was time for me to tell her, and soon it would be too late.

            I had to make myself talk to Alex first. I thought it would come out all jumbled and nervous when I told her. Instead, it came out really serious.

            “You don’t think I misunderstood, do you?” I asked Alex.

            Alex took a drink of wine and turned her head at that idea. She reached over to put her hand on my knee. She rubbed at it as if dismissing my comment and comforting me at the same time.

            “I think she’s interested in you. And I think you need to decide whether you’re willing to tell her the truth and what you’re going to do if not,” Alex said.

            Alex has this tone, sometimes, this tone where something just is what it is, and, well, she had the tone in spades now.

            “I want to tell her,” I said. “I’ve wanted to tell her for a while.”

            “Okay, Kara. It’s your choice,” Alex said after years of working on being able to say something like that to me.

            “It’s not just my choice. All of your lives are tangled up in mine.”

            “No way. We signed on for the risks. But you get to decide who’s in. Not us. You are by far the one most at risk in this.”

            “This isn’t just some random someone I happen to like, Alex. Lena is the most dangerous person I could have picked.”

            “Well, maybe not _the_ most… not that I can think of anyone higher up offhand. I mean, she is human, after all.”

            “I think I need all of you to back me on this one.”

            “If you trust her, I’m willing to give her a chance. Whatever she is, she is definitely smart. She’s not going to tell the public about Kara Danvers being Supergirl. Not knowing who’s behind the two of you the way she does. There’s too much at risk.”

            “I guess that should make me feel better.”

            “I guess it should. Kara, maybe, just, don’t tell the guys about this, not just yet. I think it’s fair to wait and see what happens first.”

            I took Alex’s advice about the guys. I got tense and serious thinking about telling Lena, and I could tell they knew something was up. I didn’t have much time any way I played this. I managed to ask Lena to dinner with me at a place near my apartment. I was edgy around Lena all night. She thought something had happened at work. When she gathered that I didn’t want to talk about it with her, she tried to give me space. She was so comfortable with me, it almost hurt to see it. It felt like this beautiful, elegant thing made of bulletproof glass that I was about to shatter with my freaky strength.

            Lena told her chauffer where to meet her and walked me to my door. I kept losing the thread of our conversation, and she finally just walked with me in silence. I had this nervous idea that she might try to take my hand, but she never did. I asked if she would come up for a minute and said there was something I wanted to talk to her about and it wouldn’t take long.

            I couldn’t look at her on the way up. I was about as morose as a member of a funeral procession. Whatever confidence I ever had in her response had died. I knew exactly how she felt about aliens hiding who they were. And here I was right next to her, listening to it all, debating her like we were equals, and getting closer to her, shaping her life against her consent. I had gotten myself into this. Now, it felt like I owed her the truth and deserved the storm that giving it to her would bring raining down on my life.

            I turned on a few lights. Lena was leaning against the wall and looking around my apartment. She was pleased to be brought up, I could tell. From her expression, I imagined she was thinking of flirting with me. I found myself looking her up and down and thinking about how beautiful she looked. I closed my eyes for a second when she caught me looking. I wish that were what this was about, I thought, and my heart ached already. I tried to think of some way to begin. Nothing came to mind. I realized it probably didn’t really matter whether I said anything or not, and I defaulted to acting instead of thinking or trying to find the right thing to say any longer. I came to line myself up with where Lena was standing, but I was too embarrassed to look at her face.

            I took off my glasses. I had to take a couple steps to put them on the table, and I unbuttoned my top button as I did. I was undoing the next one, when Lena interrupted me. She reached out and stepped in close to me quicker than I was ready to handle. Her hand was on my face and her body so near to mine. I was thrown and had let go the buttons. I looked over her expression, and she hadn’t misread me exactly. She had just seen that I liked her, and she was a little surprised. Her first instinct, though, was to come this close, so obviously she liked me back. But she also had misread what I was doing, so she was about to kiss me. At that thought, I glanced at her mouth without really meaning to, and that made it even more obvious how I felt about her. So she leaned in to kiss me without a word spoken between us.

            I got completely swept up in our kiss. If I say she was a good kisser, so good I wasn’t prepared for how it felt, it wouldn’t quite convey the experience. I love to take people flying, because I remember what it felt like to start up again after I stopped for so long. The dream of flight was held in my body, and I longed everyday for what I missed even if I didn’t notice it. I figure that same yearning might be buried in the unconscious minds of people on this earth, and only a handful of them felt it strong enough to have invented ways of flying. So I like that I can help it rise up and bring them to a place they always wanted but couldn’t really imagine before. When it’s just your own body in the air, no machines, the feeling is beyond incredible. And for a second, I experienced something very much like what I knew those people must feel when I lifted them up off the ground. Lena had swept me up, and I was completely winded and unable to speak in those first moments.  

            Our hands were tangled up in each other’s. So she felt me go stiff and moved back. I made a quick flurry of shakes of my head. A rush of emotions was flooding through me, and I had to become steady even a little bit to keep on with this.

            “Wait, wait,” I said, so she would help me stop, because I felt like I might lean in again without meaning to do it and we would kiss again, and then when I told her it would only be worse. “There’s something you should know about first. Something you would want to know.”

            Lena’s expression became serious and curious, and she studied my confusing expression. I had to look away from her as I undid the buttons on my shirt and opened it to show the emblem on my chest. I couldn’t help but look up to watch her reaction. If she had been shocked before when she realized I liked her, well, she was shocked now in an all new way. This was the kind of shock where you felt yourself go cold and imagined you had turned pale in the rush of a single moment. There was nothing good about the experience of the kind of shock written across her face.

            I figured I had only a few seconds before she thawed enough to get ahold of herself and walk out in a complete rage. A rush of emotions was already flooding my chest, and when this next wave hit and added to it, I was overcome. I broke out crying. And I spoke in a frantic kind of rush, as I pulled my shirt closed to hide my insignia behind what pride I still had access to inside myself in that moment.

            “There are reasons why we hide. There are reasons why we’re like this.”

            The sound of the tears had changed my voice and made it clear there was a resignation and desperation in what I was saying, like it was meant more to protect myself than to argue or try to convince her of anything. I couldn’t get my buttons, and I looked back up at Lena. Lena was watching me with a concentrated look that almost became a grimace. She seemed to come to fully. And to my surprise, she stepped in and put her arms around me. I was so surprised by this, and I was really weeping now at the feel of her coming close, but I found myself putting my arms around her, too, accepting the gift of an embrace with a quiet kind of astonishment. I don’t know if it would have gone the way it did if it weren’t for that embrace. Even if it didn’t change the estrangement that existed between us that was right out in the open and fully felt now, holding onto each other made it clear in a way beyond words that the bond between the two of us was real.

            “I’m sorry,” she said in a stifled voice.

            I knew that her feelings about this weren’t fully formed yet. But I hadn’t expected her to feel any remorse. She felt guilty, too, like I did. She must have been thinking over all the things she had said to me over the past months and seeing them in a new light. And she must have really cared about me to feel sorry at all, when she was being honest and I wasn’t. I was afraid her feelings would form into a hard wall of hate made only harder by whatever else once existed between us. That she could feel sorry for her part in this gave me hope, and I had an instinct to cling to that thread of hope. Still, it wasn’t enough to convince me of anything just yet.

            Lena stepped back. She had a grave look on her face, but she didn’t quite seem angry. I wiped my eyes. My emotions were settling down a little bit. It was that kiss followed immediately by her response that had overwhelmed me. That was too much. She got me by the arms gently and led us to the couch. She sat down right beside me. She was biting her lip in concentration, thinking hard for what might have been minutes.

            “I don’t know how I didn’t see it,” she said with her eyes moving over the line of my face. “I mean I think it occurred to me once in a flicker of thought, but I pushed that intuition aside without giving it an ounce of merit. It seemed absurd.”

            She reached towards my chest, looking to my face to make sure it was okay. I was surprised but didn’t want to stop her. She opened my shirt up again and ran her thumb over the fabric on my chest. An embarrassing heat started blooming under my skin at the feel of her hand and rising up my neck, and my heart beat harder. She leaned back into the couch then and sat just thinking. I felt almost desperate to know what was on her mind, but I was so surprised that she was still here beside me that I hadn’t the slightest idea of what to say now. She sat up again and reached into my lap to put her hands on top both of mine.

            “I won’t tell the public who you are, I promise,” she said.

            That seemed really kind to me. But then I remembered what Alex had said. Maybe she was calculating in her mind and was just drawing a first line in the sand. That didn’t mean she forgave me for lying. That didn’t mean she could accept me for who I was. And that didn’t mean that she could still harbor whatever feelings she had developed for me before this.

            “You don’t have to make me any promises right now,” I said.

            “I don’t know what this means yet, but I can tell you now that I won’t make life unsafe for you or your family,” she said. “It cost a lot for you to tell me already, I can see. When did you decide you would?”

            “I’ve wanted to for a while. But it was last time.”

            “Our walk in the park?”

            I nodded. Lena shook her head and pursed her lips in concentration. She seemed to be trying to untangle her thoughts by sheer intellectual force and will. She laughed suddenly and closed her eyes as she did. She smiled over at me, and the expression filled me with so much relief, even if it got drowned in my worry.

            “You wouldn’t go to bed with me unless I knew?” she said with a slow blink.

            I found myself swallowing hard several times. I nodded to her. I honestly hadn’t really realized that was even an option. I had taken the hint, but I hadn’t realized she would have wanted it to go that far. Now my heart ached with loss even more. I hadn’t realized how close I was to having what I wanted. I should have told her sooner. Now, things would be all messed up. Lena’s eyes were sharp with concentration.

            “Is it difficult for you to go to bed with humans? I mean, would they know, somehow, even if you hadn’t told them?”

            “No,” I said with a shake of my head. “They wouldn’t have to know. I’ve never done that before. I don’t know if I could. I mean, it wouldn’t really be me, would it?”

            “So Kara Danvers is the façade, and Supergirl is who you really are then?”

            “No. They’re both me. I need both to be everything I am. And I need people who understand both.”

            Lena caught something in that.

            “People who see who you really are and love you for it?” she said, quoting what I had said a long time ago when she remarked on how close I was with my friends.

            Since then, she had said that was how she felt about me and that she had never had that before. My eyes burned remembering. I felt a little sick about my own deception.

            “I’m sure you feel betrayed…” I said.

            “I don’t know,” Lena interrupted me and sort of dismissed that idea. “I’m in love with Kara Danvers. I’m not in love with Supergirl. If you two are the same person, well…. Maybe I will be soon enough.”

            That was so much kinder than anything I had thought she would say. And it gave me so such a strong surge of hope. It burned in my chest like a sun. I wanted so badly to say, "I'm in love with you, too." But it wouldn't have been fair. She was looking at me, though, and we were close enough already that she saw it even without my saying anything. I knew that she could see it from the way her face softened and her body swayed ever so slightly. I cried a little bit that I couldn't quite keep it in, probably more from the feeling of happiness and relief than anything else flooding through me.

            “I need to take some time to think,” she said.

            I nodded severely. I owed her that, at the very least. She was looking closely at my face again, still thinking hard. A long silence passed with the two of us just looking at each other. We would both be exhausted from tonight, I could tell. She sat up and looked around the apartment in a way that meant she was about to get up and leave. Then she looked over at me again, and her look was still thoughtful but grown softer it seemed. I rubbed at my face, trying to get my composure, so I could let her out and end this as well as I could manage. I already felt so tired, I was longing for bed.

            I don’t know what she decided in that moment. But she reached over and got me by the wrists. She moved over closer to me. And she got her hands on my neck and dragged me in to kiss me again. The kisses were changed from the ones we shared before she knew. They were still graceful and passionate in a way that made me feel nearly dizzied. Now, there was a severity in them, a little bit of desperation like she was trying to hold on. I could tell she wasn’t ready to let it go yet, whatever we had between us. I could also tell that she didn’t know yet whether or not she would be able to do it. At least she would try, I thought. And that was so much more than I could have hoped. I held her hands close to my face for a moment in gratitude.

            A handful of days passed, and I did not hear a word from Lena. I couldn’t stop glancing at my phone to see if I had missed a text. I wasn’t really scared anymore, now that it was out in the open. But I couldn’t help but feel really depressed by what I thought I had probably lost. I couldn’t hide my mood from the guys, but only Alex knew what was really happening. I knew she was concerned about our security as much as she was concerned about my feelings, even though she didn’t talk to me about it. She was probably planning countermeasures against Lena in her mind even while she was buying me my favorite candies and a new sweater. Some small part of me had started to believe that I would never hear from Lena again. It seemed impossible that the outcome wouldn’t be more dramatic, for better or worse.

            News finally came to me by an unexpected route – the news. Jimmy came rushing out of his office to grab me when I passed by his windows. He nearly dragged me inside and let the door shut.

            “Kara,” Jimmy said, “We just got a news brief. You’re not going to believe this. Lena Luther says she’s burying her new patent and keeping alien detection devices off the market. She says she had a change of heart. Listen to this quote, ‘If we hadn’t invented this device, someone else would have. I’m glad it was our company and that we have an opportunity to block the further oppression of an already marginalized and stereotyped population that I have only recently come to recognize as a widely diverse and complex subset of our community. We will do all we can to keep our patent secure, and we will prosecute anyone who seeks to capitalize on this technology to the fullest extent of the law. But our alien friends and neighbors need to be fully warned that this technology does indeed exist, and it does work. Our patent, which makes our device exclusive, simply will not hold forever. And they need to be prepared with legislation and counter-technology to face what’s ahead in the coming days.”

            I was too astonished to speak for a moment. Jimmy was trying to read my face. He thought I would be happy, and I must not have looked like I was. He had no idea what I was thinking.

            “You don’t think it’s some kind of trick, do you? Something worse buried underneath this? You trust her?” he said.

            I was shaking my head at those first two questions, then I started nodding at that last one. And then I just started crying. Jimmy came and put his arm around my shoulders. I patted his arm and pulled myself together as quick as I could.

            “I didn’t’ know you were so worried about this,” Jimmy said to me gently.

            I didn’t bother to try and explain it to him now. I would tell the guys eventually. Lena had sent the announcement over meaning for me to hear it in this way, and right now, it felt like something deep and private between the two of us. I wasn’t really ready to share the full story just yet. I took the paper from his hand to read the words again for myself, and he told me I could keep that copy. I could tell it was the original from the creasing. I brought the letter into my office and set it in the middle of my desk and stared down at it for a while. I knew already that I would keep it for years to come. It was the nicest love letter anyone ever sent to me.


End file.
